Philip Larkin Archives

Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a case of wrongful critical conviction

During his lifetime, Philip Larkin, the self-effacing ‘Hermit of Hull’ (where he was the University Librarian), was held in public affection as an ‘accessible’ poet, minor novelist, and quirky jazz critic. His death in 1985 was mourned as the passing of – in W. H. Auden’s phrase – ‘a master of the English language’. But with the publication of his Selected Letters, edited by Anthony Thwaite (1992), and Andrew Motion’s biography, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993), the tide began to turn.

Germaine Greer characterised Larkin’s verse as ‘anti-intellectual, racist, sexist, and rotten with class-consciousness’ while Tom Paulin condemned the Letters as a ‘revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals the sewer under the national monument that Larkin became’.

What Paulin and other commentators failed to understand was the fundamental distinction between private and public correspondence. Unless one is a compiler of the dreadful and usually seasonal round robin to friends and acquaintances, letters are written to individuals, and take into account their sensibilities. Larkin certainly knew this, yet a recent eBay auction listed Motion’s biography under the key words: ‘Homosexual Pornography Poet PHILIP LARKIN Nazi’.

John Osborne’s purpose in this adversarial and provocative polemic is to rescue Larkin from both his disciples and his detractors, who have combined and conflated the man with his work. As Osborne cautions, ‘a narrator of invented experiences is not to be confused with an actual author and real ones’.

Read correctly, neither Larkin’s poems nor his prose reveal an ‘anti-Modernist’, Little Englander, blinkered jazz lover, homophobe or racist bigot. On the contrary, he emerges as a magisterially informed, radical and subversive writer, fully conversant with and sympathetic to the plight of oppressed minorities – including African-Americans, immigrants and the white working classes.

In an excellent chapter on ‘Larkin and Modernism: Jazz’, Osborne contends that from its beginnings jazz, with its stylistic and creative innovations, was ‘Modernist music par excellence’ and was seen as such. But Larkin, because of his famous/notorious anti-modernist stance (‘Parker, Pound and Picasso’), liked to pretend that jazz stopped being ‘jazz’ with the bebop revolution of the 1940s. It didn’t, and he knew it.

Osborne also offers a brilliant (and persuasive) interpretation of the poem ‘For Sidney Bechet’ and also notes that Larkin’s other jazz hero was Louis Armstrong who, he suggested, was ‘certainly quite comparable’ in cultural stature with Pablo Picasso. So much for Larkin the private racist and public ‘anti-Modernist’.

Where the ‘pink professoriate’ and ‘self-appointed guardians of public morality’ – including Terry Eagleton, Lisa Jardine – have castigated Larkin as a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative, Osborne reminds us that the only poem he was commissioned to write by the Tory party (‘Going, Going’) was ‘so little to their liking that they brutally censored it before publication’.

Again, far from being unaware of working-class culture, Larkin identified (even if he did not identify with) its consumer novelties: ‘split-level shopping, transistors, deodorants, the Pill, Bri-Nylon, Baby-Doll nighties, the Beatles’ first LP’. In poems like ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, Osborne suggests, Larkin deconstructs the ‘discourse of modern advertising’ as profoundly as does the work of pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol.

Despite his myopic scholarly detractors, Larkin’s influence and reputation have been recognised by musicians, artists and creative writers. Leonard Bernstein nominated Larkin as the twentieth century’s greatest poet (Osborne views him as ‘the greatest poet of doubt since [Thomas] Hardy’). The paintings in Damien Hirst’s latest exhibition are all titled after a Larkin poem, while Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Julian Barnes have acknowledged his ‘liberating role’ in their work.

Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence deserves a wide readership. It sheds fresh light on his oeuvre and its sources, and, most importantly, sends one back to the poems (and prose) with sharpened perceptions.

Academic students of literature will also welcome the two chapters on ‘Larkin and Philosophy’. Only occasionally does Osborne lapse into the arcane jargon of the new literary criticism, as in his endorsement of Barbara Everett’s recognition of Larkin’s indebtedness to T.S. Eliot. She, we are informed,

appreciates that this Eliotic citationality desiderates a text-centred rather then an author-centred methodology, the incorporation of elements by other hands generating a problematic of multiplicity, heterogeneity and exteriority that challenges the author’s sovereignty.

Larkin’s response to this intelligence might well have been: ‘In a pig’s arse, friend’. But he would surely have welcomed the aside that ‘The worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn softer than what passes for mainstream entertainment in contemporary cinema or television (let alone the internet).’

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John Osborne, Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 304, ISBN: 1403937060

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Larkin’s Jazz

September 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

4-CD boxed set compilation of Larkin’s favourite music

During the last decades of the twentieth century Philip Larkin was a sort of unofficial poet laureate – having turned down the offer of the real post on the death of John Betjeman. What many of his admirers didn’t realise at the time was that he used to write regular reviews of jazz recordings for The Daily Telegraph for a decade between 1961 and 1971 (later published as All What Jazz) and in fact as a youth he even harboured aspirations to become a jazz drummer. Larkin’s Jazz is a 4-CD box set compilation of his favourites.

A poet famous for his gloom (he called himself ‘the Hermit of Hull’) he confessed in later life that jazz had provided him with some of the happiest moments of his life. And his enthusiasm for the foot-tapping, life-enhancing spirit of jazz music lasted from his boyhood in pre-war Coventry to his death in 1985. This multi-disc compilation of his favourite music was created as a tribute to the poet and critic on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his passing.

The vast majority of these tracks are what used to be called ‘hot’ jazz – upbeat and spirited music – from his first record purchase of ‘Tiger Rag’, through Lionel Hampton, to Earl Bostic’s ‘Flamingo’ (which I remember buying as a teenager in the 1950s to dispel the tedium of Family Favourites, and Those You Have Loved.

The contents of the four discs are arranged in a sequence that reflects the order in which Larkin experienced the music. The first CD brings together the recordings that he collected as a youth in the 1930s. These include Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, The Chicago Rhythm Kings, and Count Basie. These might strike contemporary listeners as decidedly old-fashioned, but it should be kept in mind that jazz music at that time was regarded generally as a risque and corrupting influence, and the only music (apart from classical) broadcast by the BBC was of mind-numbing banality.

The second disc collects some of the music he experienced at University, along with fellow student Kingsley Amis who became a lifelong friend. Outstanding names here include Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, and Gene Krupa. You might be tempted to conclude from this that his taste was mainly for white musicians, but to his credit Larkin was an early enthusiast for blues singers such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.

The third represents the music he reviewed during his stint for the Telegraph, and appears to cast the appreciative net a little wider. Sidney Bechet, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and Duke Ellington are featured names here. Not that Larkin’s reviews were confined to such a narrow historical period. But it’s well known that he was no lover of modern jazz, and the compilers have probably more accurately reflected Larkin’s tastes rather than including music by Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and even John Coltrane that Larkin had reviewed but did not like.

Most of these recordings were originally issued on 78 rpm records, which constrained performances to about three and a half minutes maximum. But the fourth CD features more extended items taken from long playing records that Larkin used to listen to with friends in the 1970s and 1980s.

These Proper Box productions are tremendous value at four CDs for less than ten pounds, but this one has the additional bonus of an accompanying booklet that offers not one but two essays of appreciation, plus commentary notes, photographs and a full discography of every track. This scholarship is shared by Trevor Tolley, an authority on Larkin and John White, a colleague of Larkin’s at the University of Hull, biographer of Artie Shaw, and co-editor of Larkin: Jazz Writings. No wonder it’s already at the top of the best-seller lists.

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Larkin’s Jazz, London: Proper Box Records, 2010, ISBN: B003LZ38IW

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Larkin’s Jazz Essays and Reviews

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Jazz criticism from a major English poet

Larkin’s Jazz is a collection of record and book reviews that has been assembled to flesh out Philip Larkin’s oeuvre of writings on jazz. It also seeks to correct the idea that he was a jazz reactionary — an impression he created himself by his introduction to All What Jazz, the collection of his monthly record reviews for The Daily Telegraph. This also covers a wider time span – starting with a piece he wrote for a school magazine and going up into the early 1980s.

It’s a collection of reviews from the Guardan the Observer and elsewhere. What emerges is a rational, humane view of jazz and related topics, a sincere concern for the plight of African-Americans (who he refers to as Negroes – which was PC at the time) and of course a lustful sense of fun for the music. He writes on Count Basie, Billy Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, jazz photography, other jazz critics such as Francis Newton and LeRoi Jones. The editors Richard Palmer and John White do everything they can to reclaim the image of Larkin which has been generated by his biographies and published correspondence:

these book reviews give the lie to the charges of misogynist, racist and anti-modernist curmudgeon levelled against Larkin by politically correct critics who also revealed themselves as incapable of detecting irony or wit in the purple prose that vivifies much of his correspondence.

Whether they do that or not depends partly on how much else any reader already knows about Larkin and his – ahem, idiosyncratic views and tastes. But these pieces are certainly well worth reading in their own right. As a reviewer myself, I noticed how well-crafted the reviews are – amazingly short, yet combining an account of the book or the record, a personal opinion, and a neat sliver of readable journalism as well.

Of course much of what he has to say is about very traditional forms of jazz, and even though that’s clearly his own taste it’s not entirely his own fault. He was reviewing at a time when most print publications on the subject of jazz were rather conservative.

He admires the writing of Whitney Balliett, but sees its limitations:

in the end we are left with the impression of brilliant superficiality. Perhaps that is editorial policy: the New Yorker was always strong on polish. But the only thing you can polish is a surface.

This collection has been edited with loving care. Even the smallest items and least-known names are swaddled in supportive endnotes. It’s one for connoisseurs: devotees of jazz music, or those interested in the opinions and occasional writings of a very influential poet.

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Richard Palmer and John White (eds) Larkin’s Jazz: Essays and Reviews 1940-84, London: Continuum, 2001, pp.190, ISBN: 0826453465

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Letters to Monica

March 4, 2015 by Roy Johnson

poetry, academic gossip, sex, equivocation, and death

Philip Larkin first met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in the autumn of 1946 when they were both twenty-four. He was the newly appointed Assistant Librarian and she was a Lecturer in English. In 1950 he moved to Belfast, and then on to Hull, while she remained at Leicester. She started as a correspondent and friend, became his lover and confidante, and spent forty ears as his sometime muse and psychic nursemaid until his sudden death in 1985.

This is a selection from the almost two thousand letters he wrote to her – though he wrote double that number to his mother. Unfortunately, her side of the correspondence is embargoed in the Bodleian Library until 2035.

They were rather an oddly matched couple. He was shy, reserved, and socially very conservative. She was a flamboyant blonde who was given to wearing short skirts, fishnet tights (sometimes with holes) and high-heeled shoes. He was assiduous in his attitude to work (even though he didn’t like it): she on the other hand never published a word in her whole career as a university lecturer

The letters begin as Larkin, newly appointed as assistant librarian at Queens University Belfast, is seeking estimates for a privately printed edition of his poems. Given his later fame, this is a salutary lesson for any would-be writers. He also begins what was to become a long series of equivocations when setting up meetings with Monica.

They tested the temperature of the other’s enthusiasm from the tone and content of their letters. Yet his hesitation and contradictions regarding their planned assignations are amusingly reminiscent of Kafka. Timetables, routes, hotels, and dates are discussed in excruciating detail, potential excuses for a no-show are set up in advance, and penny-pinching attention to the cost are flagged up in a clear display of his ambivalence about the relationship.

Larkin’s complex romantic life is now quite well known, but what the letters reveal is very much a meeting of minds. They had similar literary tastes and similar isolationist tendencies – though the editor of this volume Anthony Thwaite puts it differently, saying that “e;they fed each other’s misery”e;.

Larkin comes across as breathtakingly pompous and arrogant when lecturing Monica on how she should modify her style of conversation – though it should be said that first-hand accounts report her as hectoring people in general, and paying no attention to what they said in reply – which were precisely his criticisms.

There are persistent complaints and self-criticism about his lack of productivity, and yet sadly thirty volumes of his personal diaries were destroyed after his death. The request was his own; it was enacted by Monica as his literary executor; and the journals were shredded in Hull library by his secretary.

There is an enormous amount of moaning, complaints about illnesses (real and imaginary), disgust at his own ineffectuality, and endless reasons for not getting married, which Monica was clearly expecting him to propose. Indecision and a stolid bachelor inertia dogged his every step. In one single letter he goes into a rage about the noise from a neighbour’s radio, then turns down the opportunity of renting a spacious flat because it would be too big and ‘No sound would ever have penetrated its walls’.

The year 1955 should have been a high point in his life: he had secured the job at Hull on a good salary (£1,500 pa) and the first volume of his poems was being published to some acclaim. Yet his letters are full of self-loathing and despair:

I do feel absolutely sick at heart, my blankness has been goaded into revulsion & I am up in arms again, sufficiently fed up to start moving [address] again, back at the point when not moving is worse than moving. And I can’t do anything, not now: I must endure the weekend, & all next week, & … This state of mind is different than my earlier howls: this is a kind of nausea, as if life were some milk-skin clinging to my lip. I don’t, at the moment, see how I am going to endure it, it’s all so frightful

This is the sort of volitional paralysis and neurasthenia (to say nothing of the hypochondria) which reinforces the comparison with Kafka – another literary bachelor who was riven by contradictions, moved from one set of rented lodgings to another, and agonized endlessly about his fear of marriage.

What makes the letters bearable and very entertaining amidst all the misery is their fluidity and inventiveness, his gossipy wit, adoption of comic personae, abrupt variations in register, his heterogeneous topics, and his cultivated intelligence.

Larkin is voracious in his reading and not at all snobbish in taste – everything from renaissance poetry to contemporary fiction. He championed Barbara Pym and helped to restore her reputation. His essential favourites are classics, and his enthusiastic notes on Bleak Housemake you feel like reading it again, as do his observations and deep feelings for Hardy’s poetry.

It’s easy to see why Monica was so exasperated by his failure to ‘commit’. When he was taken into hospital following a collapse, she rushed from Leicester to his bedside, yet he wouldn’t let her stay in his (empty) flat in case she read his diaries. And when she raised the question of money and inheritance, he claimed to have a phobia about making a will.

He makes hardly any effort to visit her – even though she lived only a few miles from his mother, who he visited regularly. Or he would ‘call in’ for just an hour on his way back from London. Even when he had two sabbatical terms as a fellow at All Souls Oxford, he found all sorts of reasons not to make the make the short journey up to Leicester, including not wishing to drive at night.

There is quite an excruciating series of letters in 1964 and 1965 where he tries to wish away her wounded feelings when she found out about his parallel affair with Maeve Brennan, a colleague in the Library at Hull. He admits his culpability, but doesn’t feel he can do anything about it, and admits he would be ‘shattered’ if she were to do the same from her independent base in Leicester. It’s perhaps as well that Monica never seems to have realised at the time that there was a ‘third woman’ with whom he shared sexual comforts – his matronly secretary Betty Mackereth.

Later in their tortured lives, the tensions between them were eased somewhat by the arrival of ill health. Monica fell downstairs, then afterwards developed shingles. Larkin took her into his house and looked after her, finally acknowledging that they were a ‘couple’. He made her his literary executor, then following his own sudden demise, Monica stayed living in the house until her own death in 2001.

He was an amazingly acute observer and a sound judge of character. One of Monica’s favourite students (and would-be swain) went on to become a lecturer at Manchester University, where he was renowned for his idleness. Larkin pins him down in a single sentence: “e;[he] will will get on up to a point – the point at which has to do some work”e;. This makes his sketch of F.R.Leavis (then at the height of his fame) all the more amusing:

Well, Leavis … what a ghastly little man! … one of the bores of the century, I’d say — and really a typical Oxbridge don, cocky, smart, full of petty cattiness. Oh dear. And what a bore. ‘I live on my nerves’, he told me .. I don’t wonder that Cambridge, or Downing, can’t stand him at any price … I’ve never met a man so full of himself. Stupid little sod, the ideas rattling in him like peas. No, a typical don, one who likes being a don … I’ve not met a sillier man for many a long day … I’m awfully glad to reflect that I don’t possess a single book by him. Not a single book.

These are a very welcome addition to the successful volume Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, and they seem to cry out for a future collection in which Larkin’s letters are placed alongside those written in reply by Monica Jones. But we will have to be very patient: her correspondence is locked in the Bodleian Library for the next twenty years.

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Anthony Thwaite (ed), Letters to Monica, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, pp. 475, ISBN: 0571239102

Philip Larkin biography

September 10, 2014 by Roy Johnson

his life, and a critical re-assesment of his major poetry

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love is the latest biographical study of arguably Britain’s most popular twentieth century poet. In his Introduction, respected and prolific Larkin scholar James Booth clearly sets out his position and concerns. Philip Larkin he believes is ‘by common consent, the best-loved British poet of the last hundred years’. But three decades after his death, he ‘remains a controversial figure, both as a poet and a man’. Ironically, his posthumous reputation was inadvertently tarnished by his two literary executors. Anthony Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) (properly) included his ribald and Chaucerian correspondence with like-minded friends, notably Kingsley Amis. The self-appointed literary guardians of public morality were quick to pounce, accusing him of racism, sexism, Thatcherism, misogyny and homophobia.

Andrew Motion’s official biography, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993), despite its impressive research, was also disapproving of his alleged character traits and proclivities. More recent ‘Larkin Studies’ have been (to borrow a Larkinian phrase) more precious than valuable, subjecting him to arcane post-modern analysis and exegesis. But the publication of Archie Burnett’s Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (2012), with its meticulous ‘Commentary’ on the provenance of his verse, has done a lot to restore a Larkin-centred appreciation of his poetic oeuvre.

James Booth now convincingly and gracefully rehabilitates Larkin (whatever his real or imagined personal ‘failings’) as a poet of the people: ‘Phrases and lines from his poems are more frequently quoted than those of any other poet of his time’. ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three’; ‘What are days for?’; ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’; ‘What will survive of us is love.’ Booth argues that ‘For the moment he seems to have had the last poetic word on love, on death, on the Great War, on parents, on ageing, on hedgehogs.’

Booth also suggests that Larkin’s poems feature the most uncompromising reflections on death outside the soliloquies of Shakespeare. With a veiled reference to Larkin’s sanctimonious detractors, he cautions that ‘there is no requirement that a poet should be likeable or virtuous’, but adds that all of his former friends and colleagues remember Larkin as a compassionate, courteous and extremely funny person, certainly not the morose ‘Hermit of Hull’. He was, Booth contends persuasively, ‘an ebullient provocateur with an instinct to entertain’, and ‘the various ideological Larkins who raise the passions of some critics, are provisional personae’. Like other human (and humane) beings, Larkin presented different faces to different people. His epistolary and hilarious ‘obscenities’ to Kingsley Amis, for example, were not retailed to Barbara Pym.

Booth deftly traces Larkin’s early years in Coventry and his relations with his parents, Sidney and Eva. As is well known, Sidney, City Treasurer of Coventry, was a declared admirer of Hitler and the Third Reich. Booth asserts that his father’s political views served only to turn his son away from embracing any coherent political ideology. In fact, his vague political sympathies veered more to the left than to the right, and many of his later poems first appeared in journals like the New Statesman.

On the other hand, Larkin père encouraged his son’s early passion for jazz, and also provided the family home with a decidedly ‘modern’ library: Hardy, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. But his parents’ obviously unhappy union did instil in the young Philip a life-long fear of marriage – or ‘misogamy’. The lacklustre Eva, although castigated in some of Larkin’s published letters, was to be the recipient of thousands of tender (and as yet unpublished) notes and letters from him for the remainder of her long life.

His years at Oxford introduced Larkin to Kingsley Amis and a circle of friends who made jazz their secular religion. Following his war-time job as a librarian in Wellington, where he met his first love, Ruth Bowman, Larkin went to the University College of Leicester and encountered the formidable and voluble Monica Jones. She was to remain his increasingly embittered partner until his death in 1985.

After a happy spell at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he had a brief sexual liaison with Patsy Strang, daughter of a South-African diamond-mining magnate, Larkin moved to the University of Hull, and embarked on affairs with the shy (and devoutly Roman Catholic) Maeve Brennan, and in the 1970s a much happier one with his common-sense and attractively mature secretary, Betty Mackereth. Larkin’s love life receives sensitive but also critical treatment from Booth. None of these women were his intellectual equals, but each, successively, became his poetic muse. No one (apart from Larkin himself) has written more insightfully about these complicated relationships.

However, perhaps the greatest strength of the book is Booth’s analyses of Larkin’s major (and minor) poems. A few examples must suffice. A Study of Reading Habits is a didactic warning against subliterary escapism. But there is an oblique subtext of self-mockery. Now, his status safely established, he ensures that one of his most quotable lines will be: ‘Books are a load of crap’.

In Church Going ‘The Church represents a moribund authority to which the poet sulkily refuses to defer. [But] his tone allows his pious readers to imagine that the poet himself shares their superstitious self-deception.’ He argues that The Whitsun Weddings, as the train journey unfolds, ‘becomes an Ode to Incipience.’ And on the notorious This Be The Verse Booth comments: ‘This must bid fair to be the funniest serious English poem of the twentieth century’ [and] must also already rival Gray’s “Elegy” in the number of parodies and pastiches it has generated.’

Larkin once said ‘I like to think of myself as a funny man’. A minor criticism of Booth’s book is that more space could have been given to Larkin the wit – and less, perhaps, to his early experiments with decidedly soft porn, as revealed in Trouble at Willow Gables, written under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman. Booth sees them as ‘high camp comedy’. Not all readers would agree.

He is on firmer ground with such Larkinesque bons mots as: sexual intercourse is ‘like asking someone else to blow your nose for you’, and [to Barbara Pym] ‘On Tuesday I have to address the freshers on “books” (“How to Kill, Skin & Stuff Them’). Or [to Kingsley Amis] after Larkin had declined the Poet Laureateship which was then accepted by Ted Hughes: ‘The thought of being the cause of Ted’s being buried in Westminster Abbey is hard to live with.’ The Selected Letters, and his poems offer many other revealing and ludic examples of Larkin the ‘funny man’.

Elsewhere, Booth offers nuanced interpretations of Larkin’s infamous assault on ‘modernism’ in the arts in general and jazz in particular, evaluates his two completed and published novels [Jill and A Girl in Winter], and points out that much of his poetry reflects ‘the twelve-bar blues formula’ so that a reader ‘plays’ a Larkin poem just as one might ‘play’ a recording of Bessie Smith or of Louis Armstrong (his great hero).

Booth also relates Larkin’s awareness of and empathy with the plight of African-Americans, and his increasing deafness – as well as his love of animals and, not least, his professional achievements as Librarian at the University of Hull. We are reminded that Larkin is probably unique among twentieth-century poets in writing in Toads in a `natural, first-hand way about work in the sense of paid employment. No other significant poet, except Wallace Stevens, held down a nine-to-five job with no expectation of becoming a `full-time’ professional writer.’

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love is the best biography we have or are likely to have for a long time – until possibly the eventual release of hundreds, if not thousands, of his currently embargoed letters. Even these are unlikely to contradict Booth’s apt conclusion: ‘What will survive of him is poetry. But the thought of his literary afterlife was never any consolation to him.’

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James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp.544, ISBN: 1408851660

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Philip Larkin letters

October 5, 2014 by Roy Johnson

witty, erudite, and scurrilous correspondence

Philip Larkin was very much a glass half empty sort of person. Even when things were going reasonably well in his life, he would find a reason to look on the glum side. He satirically called himself ‘the Hermit of Hull’ and generally moaned about everything – the weather, his neighbours, the state of his health, and even the plebeian food he chose to consume. Yet in his heyday he had three lovers at the same time; public honours and popular success were showered on him as a poet, and he even had more money than he knew how to spend. Yet despite the persistent gloominess, these letters also reveal that he could be entertainingly irreverent and very funny indeed.

The editor Anthony Thwaite is at pains to point out that this is only a selection from Larkin’s complete correspondence – and it is so selective that there’s a potential danger of creating a lopsided picture of the man himself.

For instance the figure of Monica Jones hovers in the background of many letters, but there are very few addressed to the woman herself – she who played such a significant role in Larkin’s erotic and intellectual life. (There is a separate collection – Letters to Monica.) However, the few which are reproduced make very uncomfortable reading. In one Larkin gives an ‘honest’ but excruciatingly self-centred account of a weekend visit from a former lover (Patsy Strang) which verges on the sadistic – written to a woman who devoted her emotional life to him.

Of course the letters also reveal what were considered inappropriate character traits when they were first published – his penchant for soft pornography, his tendency to smut and behind-the-bike-sheds swearing – particularly in his correspondence with Kingsley Amis. But it’s worth bearing in mind both the stifling mediocrity of much British culture in these post-war years, against which these attitudes were a healthy antidote, and the fact that a fellow son of the midlands (Joe Orton) was revving up by writing in exactly the same manner a few miles down the road.

What underlies a great deal of the correspondence from a sociological point of view is that once having established himself at Oxford there is ever afterwards a network of relationships, employment, and social connections which has the British university system at its core. It emphasises Oxbridge as a system which provides a three year membership that lasts a lifetime.

Yet despite his persistent gloom and claims of being neglected, he was well connected with Faber & Faber, the BBC, and prestigious journals such as The Spectator, The Listener, and New Statesman. But to do him credit, a great deal of his early work was published by small independent presses by whom he sometimes wasn’t even paid.

The year 1955 appears to have been something of an annus mirabilis for him – first a series of publications edited by admirers such as Robert Conquest and D.J.Enright which were followed by good reviews. Then there was the move to Hull. His first impressions were not very favourable: ‘It’s a frightful dump … The village smells of chips. The town smells of fish … Life here varies from dreary to scarcely-bearable’. Yet in the end it turned out to suit him well enough (‘It’s very nice & flat for cycling’) though his regard for the University might have shocked his colleagues had they known at the time:

But in the main this institution totters along, a cloister of mediocrities isolated by the bleak reaches of the East Riding, doomed to remain a small cottage-university of arts-and-science while the rest of the world zooms into the Age of Technology. The corn waves, the sun shines on faded dusty streets, the level-crossings clank, bills are made out for 1957 under billheads designed in 1926, and the adjacent water shifts and glitters, hinting at Scandinavia … That’s a nice piece of evocation for you.

He also had no time for the business of ‘lit crit’ and the pampered existence in university academic departments. Commenting in a letter to Barbara Pym he observes: ‘If you were in university life you would be familiar with the phrase ‘crushing teaching load’ — i.e. six hours a week six months a year’.

In terms of literary development it’s interesting to note that he started in the realm of fiction, and even produced two novels – Jill and A Girl in Winter – before disenchantment set in following an unfinished sand abandoned third and fourth novel. He then settled to poetry alone, which seemed better suited to his temperament.

Yet before he had even reached the age of forty he was writing: ‘I really have no sense of the future now, except as the approach of death’ and on reaching fifty he thought it was a miracle he was still alive. As if to confirm his own sense of the sands running out, he produced less and less poetry as he got older, and yet perversely devoted huge amounts of time and effort into compiling the badly-received Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (which he referred to satirically as ‘really the Oxford Book of Nineteen & Half Century’s Right-Wing Animal-Lovers Verse.

Even though he was writing in a number of different linguistic registers to people who reflect quite distinct relationships in his life – friends, lovers, publishers, public figures – he had an amazing gift for throwing off witty epigrammatic statements:

I don’t think I write well — just better than anyone else

Personally I should need only 2 words to describe English poetry since 1960 — ‘horse-shit’

I should like to change my address in Who’s Who from ‘c/o The University of Hull’ to ‘c/o Faber & Faber , 3 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AU’, and I hope this will be acceptable to you. My reason is to make it even more difficult for people to get at me.

This attitude even extends into the darker areas of his life. After travelling regularly at weekends for years to the nursing home in Leicester where his mother was confined, he mentions to a friend:

My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That’s what you get for not dying, you see.

He was fiercely loyal to old friends such as Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Thwaite; he helped other writers notably Barbara Pym and his old school friend Colin Gunner locate publishers; and he was amazingly diligent, well-informed, and persistent over the rights of published writers to their royalty entitlements and re-publication fees. He even registered himself for VAT when it was introduced.

In many respects he was a figure of contradictions – which these entertaining letters bring out very well. He was the recluse who (within the UK) traveled widely and socialised regularly; the confirmed bachelor who maintained sexual relationships with a number of women – often at the same time; the radical anti-establishment figure who accepted public honours by the bucketload; the prolific writer who produced only a handful of well-known poems; and the anti-materialist who was much-depicted with an old-fashioned bicycle but who actually drove a four litre Rolls Royce Vanden Plas.

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Anthony Thwaite (ed), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, London: Faber & Faber, 1993, pp.791, ISBN: 057117048X

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Radical Larkin

June 21, 2014 by Roy Johnson

‘A Study of Reading [and Writing] Habits’

Radical Larkin, John Osborne’s second book on Philip Larkin is (like the first) polemical: ‘Larkin died in 1985. No-one now under 40 (and few enough aged 50) can really be said to have known the man. The future of his reputation is passing irrevocably out of the hands of those who knew him and into those who did not’. It also strikes postures: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, in place of the obdurately English poet of the critical consensus, I offer you Philip Larkin, master of deterritorialization’.

The pugilistic Osborne (a light heavy-weight) throws some below the belt punches at such distinguished Larkin commentators as Andrew Motion, who believes that the poems are autobiographical (‘as Larkin’s biographer he would say that, wouldn’t he?’), Trevor Tolley (‘A master of thinking inside the box’), Anthony Thwaite (who ‘twice recycled Larkin’s Betjeman review without referencing the source’), and James Booth (‘not because he is the worst exponent’ of ‘the conventional view of Philip Larkin as a lyric poet….but its best’.) David Timms and Richard Palmer stand jointly accused of having ‘converted [Larkin] from what he is, the greatest poet of doubt and ambiguity since Hardy, into a poet of certitude, often to the point of bigotry’. Even Archie Burnett, editor of Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (2012), to which Osborne declares himself greatly indebted, is taken to task for including ‘mere scraps of verse’ (Burnett’s own phrase) in his magisterial compilation.

Osborne’s reiterated contention is that Larkin’s poems are not autobiographical but rather the creations of ‘a professional intertextualist’ which require ‘a post-authocentric’ reading and analysis. He focuses on such seminal poems as An Arundel Tomb, The Whitsun Weddings, This Be the Verse and Aubade – as well as his second novel A Girl in Winter.

Warming to these themes, Osborne liberally sprinkles his text with such unattractive words and phrases as ‘Phonocentrism’, ‘Anti-Textualism’, ‘Radical Ekphrasis’, ‘Radical Deterritorialization’ and ‘Radical De-essentialism’. At one point his taste for neologisms leads him astray. He heads one section ‘A monstrance against the sexing of texts.’ The word monstrance either means ‘demonstration or proof’ in Middle English or ‘an open or transparent vessel in which the host is exposed’ in contemporary English. Osborne actually wants to launch ‘an assault’ upon ‘biographicalism’ and his choice of words is baffling.

Unlike Larkin’s, much of Osborne’s language is convoluted, and presumably directed at a ‘post-modernist’ readership. Summarising his contentions in Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence, Osborne reminds his readers that Larkin’s techniques ‘include ellipsis, a four-act structure with closing reversal, asymmetrical stanza lengths and rhyme schemes, plus a battery of disaggregative linguistic devices such as split similes, negative qualifiers, oxymora and rampant paronomasia’. In this new book, such doubtful coinages as ‘the sexing and racing of narrators or addressees’ do little to aid comprehension.

In his chapter on The Whitsun Weddings, Osborne triumphantly ‘proves’ – largely thanks to Burnett’s researches – that Larkin’s famous train journey (from Hull to King’s Cross) never took place, and cautions that most of his poems ‘tell one nothing about the gender, race, class or nationality of either their narrators or their addressees’. Yet Larkin’s champions and detractors ‘fill in the missing information by jumping to the conclusion that the protagonist is always and only a white, male, middle-class Englishman named Philip Larkin’. Osborne presses his ‘intertextual’ reinterpretation of The Whitsun Weddings to a ludicrous conclusion when he suggests that the line ‘Free at last!’ reflects not only the poet’s well-known passion for jazz and its roots in African-American spirituals and blues, but also echoes Martin Luther King’s famous peroration in his 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in Washington, DC so ‘the reader has been licensed to speculate whether the narrator might be an American visitor to these shores, and not necessarily a white one’. These putative Americans (whatever their ‘racing’ or ‘sexing’) might well expostulate: ‘Pur-leeze!’

But Radical Larkin does contain original insights into some of the poet’s ‘greatest hits’. Four examples substantiate the point. As a poem, Vers de Société relates ‘the foibles of polite society. In Larkin this becomes something else: a meditation on the merits of social life, the life lived in company, versus those of the meditative life, the life of solitude’. Then, This Be The Verse, with its much-quoted opening lines

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.

is described as ‘a tweet-sized poem of atomic destructiveness detonated by laughter’. Larkin’s last great poem, Aubade, is ‘a masterpiece which affords a barometric reading of late millennial Western culture as encapsulated in its ideologies of death’. And finally, commenting on At Grass, Osborne shows that he is perfectly capable of writing clearly while offering a perceptive analysis:

…it surely offers as complex a statement as may be found in our literature of the mixed emotions with which we approach the constraints and the liberations of the later stages of life. This subsuming of the elegiac into a more nuanced address to the neglected subject of retirement is a good example of Larkin’s genius for involving poetic genres only to elude them…

Unfortunately, such astute judgements are few and far between in the densely-packed pages of Radical Larkin. Too much space is taken up by Osborne’s (generally informed) comments on Western art, sculpture and literature. And, unless one applauds his statements that ‘it would do no harm to Larkin studies if for the foreseeable future we desisted from visiting the (imaginary) certitudes of the life upon the work but rather visited the (real) polyvalency of the work upon the life’, or ‘not only do [Larkin’s] poems sabotage conventional pieties regarding church, state, nationality, marriage, gender, race and capital, but in the process they play a central role in the cultural transition to postmodern indeterminacy’, I can only recommend this book to those willing to struggle with the postmodern terminology.

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John Osborne, Radical Larkin: Seven Types of Technical Mastery, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 292, ISBN: 0230348246

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a case of wrongful critical conviction

4-CD boxed set compilation of Larkin’s favourite music

Jazz criticism from a major English poet

poetry, academic gossip, sex, equivocation, and death

his life, and a critical re-assesment of his major poetry

witty, erudite, and scurrilous correspondence

‘A Study of Reading [and Writing] Habits’

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